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Indonesia, Malaysia to trial unified domestic worker recruitment system
Applications are currently being manually processed by the Indonesian Embassy pending the trial of the new system. Some 23,000 domestic workers have been approved to be matched with Malaysian employers, Indonesian Ambassador to Malaysia Hermono said recently, as reported by The Star on Saturday.
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A. Muh. Ibnu Aqil
The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Indonesia and Malaysia have agreed to test a unified channel for the recruitment and placement of migrant domestic workers later this month, but critics say the new system will require strict monitoring to prevent a recurrence of labor violations.
Jakarta lifted its ban on sending workers to Malaysia on Aug. 1, ending a two-week interruption, after both countries agreed to commit to the use of a single hiring and placement platform: Indonesia's One Channel System (OCS).
The new scheme will integrate the online systems of both the Indonesian diplomatic mission and Malaysia's immigration authority.
Applications are currently being manually processed by the Indonesian Embassy pending the trial of the new system. Some 23,000 domestic workers have been approved to be matched with Malaysian employers, Indonesian Ambassador to Malaysia Hermono said recently, as reported by The Star on Saturday.
Hermono said the workers would be coming in stages, starting in mid-August.
“The pilot project through the OCS will start in mid-August, when the platform is ready," he said as quoted by The Star. “But we’ve already processed the requests manually using the embassy’s platform.”
Jakarta had stopped sending workers to Malaysia after it was found that the recipient country had been recruiting workers outside of the OCS, which had been agreed upon as the official system in April.
"According to the [agreement], the recruitment of Indonesian migrant workers can still continue [if processed manually] before the integration of the [Indonesian] system and Malaysia's,” Erga Grenaldi, manpower attaché at the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
Malaysia relies on millions of foreign workers, who mainly come from Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nepal, to fill factory and plantation jobs shunned by locals. Indonesia typically sends hundreds of domestic migrant workers to the country every year but has slowly changed tack after strengthening its labor protection laws in 2017.
Anis Hidayah of labor rights advocacy group Migrant Care said Indonesian migrant workers in the domestic sector in Malaysia could face issues even after the new system was implemented.
Training was an important part of workers’ protection, she said, but most training centers in Indonesia, especially the privately operated ones, were more focused speeding up the recruitment process to turn a profit than actually increasing workers’ skills.
She added that there was no clear monitoring mechanism for Indonesian workers in Malaysia.
“Overall, we are still wondering whether the [new] system will work well or not,” Anis said on Thursday.
She urged Indonesia and Malaysia to formulate another agreement that governed the monitoring of workers and the handling of labor violations.
Fadjar Dwi Wisnuwardhani, expert staffer at the Executive Office of the President, said tight monitoring of the implementation of the agreement was crucial “to avoid any future uncertainties such as another temporary ban on sending migrant workers”.
The monitoring process, he said, should involve the Foreign Ministry, the Manpower Ministry and the Indonesian Migrant Worker Protection Agency (BP2MI).
He added that the Executive Office of the President would push the Foreign Ministry to speed up negotiations with Malaysia on provisions regarding human trafficking.
